Welcome aboard

Welcome aboard

A new batch of House of Representatives legislators will be
installed on Friday. They are the 550 House members who, together
with the 128 members of the Regional Representatives Council
(DPD), will make up the new People's Consultative Assembly. We
would like to congratulate them and welcome them aboard.

Conspicuously absent from the new House are representatives of
the military. The presence of their 38 unelected representatives
in the outgoing legislature is now history.

Under the amended 1945 Constitution, the new Assembly will be
less powerful than its predecessors. The outgoing Assembly
summoned president Abdurrahman Wahid twice. The first time
occurred in November 1999, only a month after he was elected,
when he was asked to explain his decision to close the ministry
of information and social services.

The second occasion took place in July 2000, when the
president was asked to explain his decision to remove two
ministers from his Cabinet. They were state minister for
investment and state enterprises Laksamana Sukardi, and minister
of industry and trade Jusuf Kalla. While he handled himself well
in his first appearance before the House, Abdurrahman floundered
in the second appearance.

Gone, therefore, is the 700-member Assembly whose immense
power earned it a reputation for being the supreme state
institution. The new House members, on whom the government has so
far spent Rp 123 billion for their housing and office
expenditures, will have more clout than their predecessors. This
is because they were elected by an open split system, in which
voters could either vote for them directly or for their parties.

In previous years, House members were elected through the
proportional representation system, which gave party executives
in Jakarta practically all the power to nominate their favored
representatives, at the expense of grassroots representation. The
true representatives of the people at present, however, are the
DPD members, being the only ones who were elected directly by the
people.

Some old faces will be returning to the new House, but most of
the legislators are new, younger, better educated personalities
who, hopefully, are more eager to serve their country and their
constituents. Waiting on the sidelines is a new government with a
new president and vice president, who are to be installed in 20
days' time. In the meantime, as political parties jockey for
ministerial posts in the new Cabinet, House members are racing to
elect their leaders.

Our thanks are due to the outgoing 550 members of the House of
Representatives, who came on board at a tumultuous time in 1999,
only a year after Soeharto stepped down. It is ironic, however,
that one sign that outgoing House members are departing is the
jump in the number of bills that have been endorsed in the last
two weeks. These include the TNI bill, which was endorsed on
Thursday, the final day of the House's term, the regional
autonomy bill, the migrant workers protection bill, the social
security bill, the domestic violence bill, and a pro-investor
bill governing highways.

It is ironic because the House always had a backlog of draft
bills that needed to be endorsed, and tended to stall in drafting
laws -- a bit of deja vu recalling the 1997-1999 House, the last
legacy of the fallen Soeharto regime, which also passed a number
of bills in its final days in an apparent attempt to be
remembered as an effective legislature.

While we cannot say that the outgoing House had the same
motivation as the 1997-1999 legislature, the similarity is
disturbing. No adequate public hearings were held for many of the
bills prior to passing them into law in the last two weeks of its
term.

During the Soeharto years, the House was often called a rubber
stamp for its meekness. Following Soeharto's fall, the House
managed to strengthen itself, due largely to the reform movement.
But it soon earned itself a new nickname, the talking shop, for
its lack of productivity in deliberating, passing and drafting
new legislation.

Departing House Speaker Akbar Tandjung acknowledged last week
that many of the laws yielded by the House, especially the 160
bills endorsed this year, were of questionable quality. Rumors of
money politics in the House notwithstanding, two House members
acknowledged on Tuesday that they had been offered cash to pass
the mining and protected forest bill. Many observers believe that
is merely the tip of the iceberg.

This is all cause for concern and should be taken into account
by the new House members. It is for them to ensure that the new
House of Representatives will be a true house of the people.